A Homily for the
Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity
Consider the lilies of the
field, how they grow;
they toil not, neither do they spin: yet I say unto you,
that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
--Saint Matthew 6:28
What
is the opposite of faith? Is it atheism? Is it
agnosticism? Is it doubt? In today's Gospel lesson, which
is part of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that the opposite of
faith is anxiety, especially if the anxiety manifests itself in
money-grubbing.
Faith is not primarily the giving of intellectual assent to a series of
propositions, even if those propositions are the Nicene Creed.
Faith is essentially trust. It is the confidence that God loves
us, knows what we need, and will take care of us.
Why
does Jesus call his listeners--and us--people of little faith? It
is because we fragile, sinful human beings give in to anxiety about our
material needs, and that keeps us from attending to what is really
important. This is not to say that we should all quit our jobs
and lie around the house waiting for God to arrange for the groceries
to be delivered and the bills to be paid. That, after all, is one
of the temptations with which Satan tempted Jesus in the desert.
But
it is to say that we should not fret over merely material needs.
We should not become consumed or obsessed by our desire to satisfy
those needs. We must not succumb to the temptation to make the
amassing of material goods the purpose of our life. Still, we do
have materal needs, don't we? We have to eat, we have to have
clothes to wear. Those things cost money, and money does not grow
on trees. But food and clothing, and the other material things
that we need, are instrumental goods. We get into trouble if we
allow them to become ends in themselves.
The
question is: who is to be master? Whom do we serve?
Jesus makes it all too clear: we can't work for two bosses,
because our ultimate loyalty has to be with one or the other. We
can say that we serve God, that Jesus is our Lord and master. But
he has a rival in our material needs, he has a rival in the goods of
this world, called by the Aramaic word "mammon" (which means "riches").
If Jesus
is our Lord, then we must hear what he says: "Don't be anxious
about material things like food and clothing. Trust me.
Trust your heavenly Father. God is sovereign over his creation;
he knows what you need, he will take care of you. You say you
need good food to eat. Look around you. Look at the birds
in the sky. They are not anxious; they do not fret. And
your father feeds them. You say you need nice clothes to
wear. Look around you. Look at the wildflowers. They
are not anxious; they do not fret. But even the most powerful
king cannot dress as sumptuously as the wildflowers."
Elsewhere in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus teaches us to pray:
"Give us this day our daily bread." That is, we pray that God
will take care of our needs as they arise, from day to day. We do
not pray--or, at least, Jesus did not teach us to pray--"give us a
lifetime supply" or "make us as rich as can be."
This
is a lesson taught in the forty years that the children of Israel spent
wandering in the desert after their exodus from Egypt. God fed
the Israelites with bread from heaven, which the Israelites called
"manna" (a word that means, "what is it?"). But they had to
gather the manna every day, enough to nourish them for that day;
anything extra that they gathered would spoil.
In a lot
of ways, that wandering in the desert is a symbolic prefiguring of our
lives as Christians in the world. The people of Israel passed
through the Red Sea, symbolizing baptism; and at the end of their
wandering they crossed into the promised land, symbolizing our heavenly
home. But, in between, they had to rough it in the desert, where
life was hard and temptations were many. But it was in their
wandering in the desert that they learned to trust God to care for them.
A few
years ago, there was a popular (if ironic) bumper sticker: "He
who dies with the most wins." Now, Saint Paul tells us that we
should consider ourselves to be dead: to have died with Christ in
baptism and to have risen with him to a new life in God. So, for
us Christians, the game is already over. We don't have to play
anymore by the rules of this world, as represented by that bumper
sticker.
We
are like the rich farmer in the parable, who had gathered so much grain
that he had to tear down his barns and build new, bigger barns to hold
it all. But the very night that the new barns were finished, the
farmer died. And all that he had amassed was of no more use to
him.
Jesus does not say that we should starve ourselves and go naked.
He says that we should not make food and clothing the purpose of our
life. He says that we should make God and his kingdom the purpose
of our life, and then, if we do that, all our needs will be taken care
of.
There is a story told of Saint Francis of Assisi, that someone asked
him how he and his brethren could endure the winter with only thin
robes to wear. And Saint Francis answered: "If our hearts
inside us are on fire for our heavenly home, we will have no trouble
enduring this outside cold." Wouldn't it be wonderful if our own
hearts were on fire for the Kingdom of God, so that we did not even
notice hunger or cold?
And
there is one more kind of anxiety that Jesus warns us against in
today's Gospel: anxiety about the future. We worry and fret
about what will happen tomorrow, or next year, or ten years from
now--as if it were in our power to control the future. Anxiety
about the future is just one more thing that works against our faith,
against our ability to trust God and his providence. Anxiety
about the future is a way of looking for trouble. "What if . . .
?" we ask, "What if . . . ?" And worrying about "what if?"
tempts us to lay up treasures on earth, to take our minds off the
heavenly certainties and to focus them on worldly contingencies.
Our
job as Christians is to work, and to pray, and to give for the spread
of God's kingdom. If we do that, if we first seek God's kingdom
and God's righteousness, then it is promised that our real needs,
whatever they may be, will be satisfied. Do we have enough trust,
enough faith, to act on that promise?
Let
us pray that God, in his grace, will give us that kind of faith.
Church of Saint Mary Magdalene
Orange, California
8 September 2002
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